DAVAO CITY (MindaNews/09 May)—With the power crisis besetting Mindanao, the Davao City Investment Promotion Center (DCIPC) is encouraging more energy investments in the city to augment supply.
Speaking at Thursday’s iSpeak forum at City Hall, Ivan Cortez, DCIPC officer-in-charge, said they are looking for more investments on rooftop solar panels as well as other energy-producing ventures.
Cortez cited that solar panels can help curb the faltering supply in the Mindanao grid once they are developed.
Despite the rotating brownouts in the city, Cortez said they have not monitored “any investor trying to back out from doing business in the area.”
Among the persistent proposals was a $116 million waste-to-energy facility, currently being discussed at the city’s private-public partnership board.
The proposal from Synova has been existing since 2011, Cortez said.
While claiming that businesses are losing up to P6 million per hour during peak hours, he said that the city “has slowly learned to adjust to the rotating brownouts.”
Generators have also become as cheap as P6,000 per unit, Cortez said.
He added that consumers have also flocked to more regularly electrified areas such as malls to manage the power outages. “We’ve experienced it before, and we’ve learned to cope.”
The more responsive business players are the more they will survive the power crisis, he said. (MindaNews)